The Polk County Sheriff’s Office is coming under fire from a First Amendment group over its social media practices.

That letter — sent this month by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (“FIRE”) — takes aim at the agency’s moderation of the PCSO and Polk County Animal Control social media pages.

The policies reportedly allow the Sheriff’s Office to remove comments and block users for posting material deemed inappropriate, offensive, vulgar, hateful, abusive or defamatory. They also prohibit personal attacks, “trolling,” certain threats, off-topic comments, website links and copyrighted material belonging to someone else.

FIRE argued that terms such as “offensive,” “inappropriate,” “vulgar,” “trolling” and “personal attack” are subjective and give moderators too much discretion. The organization said the rules could allow officials to remove comments simply because they criticize or offend government officials.

The letter also says the policies may be too broad.

FIRE noted that restrictions on comments involving harassment, threats, sexual content or defamation are not limited to narrow legal categories that are outside First Amendment protection.

The group further argues that a blanket ban on copyrighted material could prohibit lawful uses, including quoting news articles or material protected under fair-use principles.

FIRE says it understands that users have had comments hidden or have been blocked from PCSO and Animal Control pages. The organization asked the Sheriff’s Office to revise its written policies, stop restricting protected speech and unblock users who were improperly banned.

FIRE requested a “substantive response” from PCSO by Sept. 16, 2026.

News 6 has reached out to the PCSO for a statement on the letter. The PCSO later shared its response to the allegations, which the agency said was sent to FIRE on Wednesday morning.

“Thank you for writing to us regarding your concerns about our social media policy. We have reviewed your letter. It includes specific objections to provisions in our policy and you encourage us to review our policies to make sure they are not overbroad, are not too vague, and are not viewpoint-discriminatory.

Any fair review of the comments and reactions on our social media pages demonstrates that there is an extraordinarily wide scope of comments from a broad range of perspectives, including negative, mean, ugly, critical, satirical, funny, strange, emotional, positive, happy, and ecstatic. In the past 10 weeks we have had over 413,000 comments on our social media pages.

You’ll find thousands, if not tens of thousands, of those comments criticize our policies, our Sheriff, law enforcement specifically and generally, and other people and subject manner on a wide variety of topics. We are well aware of our responsibility to not engage in viewpoint discrimination.

To give you some peace of mind about our moderation policies, it would be nearly impossible for us to review and make decisions about 413,000+ comments, even if we wanted to, which we don’t. We have an extraordinarily light touch regarding moderation.

When we do moderate, they are for the more narrowly defined areas including the policy that comments in a limited public forum relate to the particular topic in the post, commercial solicitation, including links in the comment, fraudulent/phishing conduct, and automated screening for profanity such as f*ck, sh*t, c*nt, etc. (I understand you may believe this is not permitted, but we believe this is within our ability to restrict under a limited public forum, and is not viewpoint discrimination).

We are reviewing our policies for potential updates, including writing more narrow definitions.

In light of your good faith offer to assist our office, will you provide a draft for a model social media policy for a government sponsored limited public forum social media page that you believe is constitutionally sound? We would certainly take that into consideration as we refine our policy. We would also appreciate it if you would send us any court decisions over the last 5 years or so that relate specifically to limited public forums that you are aware of, and how they might inform our policies going forward. We would also appreciate it if you could send us any court decisions that you are aware of that shed light upon topics such as “time, place, and manner” restrictions in limited public forums, viewpoint neutral rules or policies, and the role that decorum and civility rules and policies might have to enhance and protect democratic participation in a limited public forum.

We will keep you in the loop as we move forward on our review of our social media policies.”

Polk County Sheriff’s Office email sent to FIRE